Carbón – Flaming Wonderful!

It all came about in a fairly simple and logical manner really. In the summer of 2015, Stéphane and I launched a new concept of a travelling Argentinian barbecue food truck. We called it The Asado Club, it started as a travelling food truck, offering barbecues with Argentinian specialities, all in unexpected places for parties and festivals. The Asado Club revisits South American street food in general and Argentinian in particular, reinterpreting it with a French touch. In October of the same year, our second project, the Maison Wafflegänger food truck, was launched, specialising in savoury waffles accompanied by a variety of free-range chicken recipes. In 2016, we opened our new shop, Empanadas on the Canal Saint-Martin, and lastly Carbón in Rue Charlot in summer 2017.

Stéphane is from the Ivory Coast where his mother had a furniture business. My background is in industrial design and I was born and brought up in Argentina. So it was natural to design Carbón as our dream restaurant. Everything is made to measure: the chairs, the stools, the lamps and even the fridges in the bar and the hanging garden! We worked together with artisans who built everything by hand. We also bought other pieces and incorporated them into our space. Plumen 003 lamps in the private dining room and on the bar in the restaurant, Mutina tiles (a limited edition by the Bouroullec brothers). The first decision we made about Carbón was the cooking technique and so the restaurant concept followed. Fire. We wanted a finished product that was simple and comprehensible to highlight that element, and so the same applies to the space. Having decided on the concept and the name, we found the place. We were looking for a warehouse to begin with, but there aren’t many in Paris. So we started looking for a space that would give off a certain lightness: with high ceilings, big windows and a natural facade. Comfort, natural materials incorporated aesthetically but without pretension were our main guidelines. Hence our slogan “An Ode to Nature“.

We decided to think about the place as a home. A living space where experiences happen. So, everything had to be soft, a bit sensual, relaxing, leaving room for the food. Naturally, we were attracted by natural raw materials, so these dictated the colours. The theory was to have more choice in textures and surfaces rather than colours.

The best thing about the space was that it was completely empty. We had a blank canvas in front of us. It was a long process: 9 months of building work in total. For the floor in the main dining room, we went for a “patio flooring” effect using red bricks found in an old house in Serbia. It looks like it’s always been there. The rest of the first floor is in natural stone from Italy. We stripped the original walls to make a feature of them. We also designed the lighting ourselves, using Zangra bulbs. For the restaurant bar and the private dining room, we used 003 lamps by Plumen. In the loos, we used wall lights from BTC England.

Carbón means charcoal in Spanish. For us, Carbón was designed as an “Ode to Nature” a place where the oldest cooking technique in the world, fire, meets the products of nature. We cook using French beech wood and charcoal made from Argentinian carob wood. Each dish is inspired by the element of fire, by seasonality and by our suppliers and producers. During our “soft opening” period, we served sharing plates, both small (so people could explore different flavours and compositions with charred, grilled and smoked vegetables and fish) and big (generally large pieces of meat that change every day: 2.5 kg steaks, lamb, lobster, etc.). We have now added a tasting menu to our offering.